Let’s talk about kale

Kale is beloved by hipsters and foodies across the country, making it one of the most stereotyped vegetables on the planet. Any casual observer will have noticed the influx of kale into the dining halls. Its spread is unstoppable, seeping into the salad bar (yummy), infiltrating the hot food line (mixed results — kale on pizza is not an ideal combination) and, given time, might even migrate into the dessert area. Kale-flavored ice cream, for its part, has made fleeting appearances at the Bent Spoon, while Starbucks has been selling kale-infused smoothies. One wonders if Big Kale is in cahoots with Campus Dining Services.

Admittedly, I actually enjoy the taste of kale and appreciate its nutritional benefits. However, there is a fine line between caring about the taste and nutrition of a food item and lapsing into fallacious arguments about its chemical contents.

In one corner of the Internet lies the blog of Vani Hari, who goes by the pen name of “Food Babe.” Major media outlets first covered her during the controversy about Subway sandwiches and yoga mat chemicals. Her blog had petitioned Subway to address the particular chemical azodicarbonamide. The problem is Hari’s claims were based entirely on nonexistent science, scaring people for nothing. NPR, generally a friend of American liberals like Hari far and wide (Hari was a 2012 Democratic National Convention delegate), reported that “outside of occupational exposure, there’s no evidence that there’s any risk at all to consumers” and the allegedly harmful chemical was just used to improve the dough. In any case, Subway went and removed the chemical from its breads to avoid any more bad press.

Hari’s blog has accrued a fair amount of press lately, with critical articles about her in the Atlantic and the New York Times, among others, published in the last few months. The popularity of Hari’s blog, according to the New York Times, is entirely driven by a fear among young people of the influence wielded by big companies and the adulteration of products, perfectly rational fears that have been whipped into hysteria. It’s like the classic joke about people being scared about “dihydrogen monoxide” exposure. Dihydrogen monoxide is just another way of saying H₂O or water, but it can be very easy to scare people with foreign-sounding scientific concepts.

There can be severe health consequences of subscribing to these unfounded claims. To return to my earlier point about kale, Hari’s blog says,“The enzymes released from kale go in to your liver and trigger cancer fighting chemicals that literally dissolve unhealthy cells throughout your body. Animals with tumors are given a diet of kale and their tumors actually shrink.” It’s a risible claim. If that really were the case, it’s time to stop the production of all cancer-fighting drugs and replace them with kale. No citation is given for that claim on her website. It is to be accepted as scientific fact, delivered by Hari for consumption by the followers of her blog and her nearly one million Facebook likers. This is unacceptable from a public health perspective. Members of the scientific community have called her the “Jenny McCarthy of food” (given her prominent role in spreading fears that vaccination causes autism), but such an approach will not convince her thousands of followers otherwise.

For a minute, let’s take Hari’s logic and run with it. Microwave ovens cause cancer. Donuts cause cancer because of the chemicals in them. Non-organic yogurt causes cancer. Bread preservatives cause attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. In essence, everything you eat is bad for you or carcinogenic, according to Hari. Good-bye, readers of the Daily Princetonian. It’s time for me to put on a tinfoil hat and hide in a cave, never to eat anything again except for free-trade, organic kale, irrigated only with the finest glacial water from the Himalayas.

There’s certainly a point to be made about regulatory capture and the effectiveness of food safety agencies. But the hysteria caused by blogs like Hari’s distracts from real food safety issues like salmonella outbreaks in eggs, spinach and peanut butter, which were some of the major recall targets in recent years. Congress passed the Food and Drug AdministrationFood Safety Modernization Act in 2010 in response to the salmonella outbreaks, but just last week, the New York Times reported that the FDA has received less than half of the money that it needed to implement those regulations. Now that’s a better place to start. The ire of Hari’s blog would be better directed toward the legislators in Congress that fail to give regulatory agencies the resources they really need to keep Americans safe from actual poisons. Those bacterial outbreaks are the real threat to people, as opposed to the imagined threats that Hari conjures up, and addressing this issue requires a shift in priorities. Kale has not yet been the subject of a salmonella outbreak. Let’s keep it that way.

Nicholas Wu isa freshman from Grosse Pointe Shores, Mich. He can be reached at nmwu@princeton.edu.